Saturday, February 25, 2017

How could we? What does it say about voters to go from best
to worst? Probably the same as going from worst to best. Consider James
Buchanan, formally regarded as the worst president ever. And he preceded
Lincoln. Of course the worst president distinction needs to be seriously
revisited.

Buchanan fell the furthest considering his impeccable
resume’. He served in both houses of Congress, was twice ambassador and
Secretary of State. Yet he allowed slavery to expand, applauded the infamous
Dred Scott decision and sat on his hands while Southern states seceded from the
Union. He bequeathed the entire mess to Lincoln in 1860.

Then there was Young Bob and Fighting Bob. The two La
Follettes were Wisconsin’s distinguished Senators from 1908 to 1946. Robert Sr.
was named, by a select committee of Congress, among the five most highly
regarded Senators ever to have served along with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.
He founded the Progressive Party and three times ran for president. His son was
a favorite of FDR and a champion of unionism and redistribution of wealth.

Yet the voters of Wisconsin, in their infinite wisdom,
replaced Robert Jr. with none other than Joe McCarthy whom history remembers as
a man with no decency having been censured by his Senate colleagues for
reckless smears and fear-mongering.

And now we have Donald Trump following two terms of Obama
who has dignified the presidency in ways few of his predecessors ever reached.
His humanity, high consciousness and deliberation set the bar higher for all to
follow. And who follows? A man consummately unfit for the office who exhibits
signs of dementia or malignant narcissism or some, as yet un-named disorder according
to serious mental health professionals.

It’s small comfort to know that this 180 degree turn of the
electorate is not without precedent. It reveals the two strains in America
which have co-existed since our inception: the Puritan ethos, authoritarian,
punitive, indifferent to the less fortunate, xenophobic along with the Liberal,
inclusive and empathic with a belief in role for the federal government.

Technology has brought with it change both accelerated and
largely hidden. Disruptions hit certain sectors harder than others. This time
around Charlie Lunch Bucket felt it and bought into Trump’s hollow promises.

One can only hope for a return to the fold as factories
remain shuttered and the economic disequilibrium gets tilted even more in favor
of Trump and his buddies who live is some alternative reality.

In the Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera, Trial by Jury, the defendant, who has
found a new subject for his affections, is being sued for breach of contract of
marriage. He sings to the jury, But this
I am willing to say / If it will appease her sorrow / I’ll marry this lady
today / And marry the other tomorrow.

Without a feel for the fundamental values of a particular
party one enters into a rocky mismatch ripe for betrayal. The working people
of the Rust Belt will soon discover they’ve been cheated. The ill-gotten gains
of corporate America are misaligned with the out-of-work and under-employed.
Their health care and Social Security are in jeopardy as is the air they
breathe… and nobody is going to invade our frozen yogurt shops.

These Trump-Democrats won’t have to travel the full 180
degrees/ The Dems also have to turn some and address the grievances of
displaced workers. To everything turn, turn, turn.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

It wasn’t quite a
forest anymore. More like a garden of botanicals. Exotic with rhizomes and
roots, excrescence on some trees. Leaves macerating. Acacia slightly rancid in
the glue bottle. It was those arcane names that drew me in and their intoxicating
breath.

They asked me, what’ll it be? You’re seventeen. Who are you? I only knew who I wasn’t. My brother, four years older, with a tool box,
tinkering under the hood. Never owned a library card. No. I would become my
father.

I entered his world
of pharmacy as it was withering. 1950, still with ancient vapors I had inhaled
as a kid. Apothecary jars on the shelf labeled podophyllin, glycyrrhiza, aqua
hamamelidis. The glossary became a second language.

Four years later I
was licensed but the Edenic garden was nearly gone. It had become bottled
alphabetically. The aromatic elixirs had vanished or fallen into disrepute.
Squibb, Parke-Davis, Upjohn, Eli Lilly, Burrough-Welcome claimed the space, now
deodorized. But we still had the Wets and Dries.

That’s what we
called it. Compound tincture of benzoin and oil of eucalyptus were some of the wets. The
stuff put into a vaporizer whose mingled odor in the steam certified a
sickroom. Bicarbonate of soda was one of the dries. They were a part of a
section dividing the prescription area from the front.

The front was where customers stood. Back in
the day the Rx compounding area was raised so the pharmacist was looked up to
as he presided between globes of colored water. My father was on that pedestal
for me but now I was eye to eye with a man faking a cough to get his hands on a
bottle of Terpin Hydrate with Codeine, aka G.I. Gin, which was among the wets.
His signature in the registry book was required; today it was Joe Smith,
tomorrow Bill Blotz. Poor guy. If the codeine didn’t get you, the alcohol did.

Wets and Dries are
the last gasp of early pharmacy. Old preparations or chemicals so long in use
they couldn’t be patented and sold as proprietaries still hang on. Iodine would
be one. Epsom salts, in five pound boxes
remain, usually filling the bottom shelf of the section. Flowers of sulfur (brimstone)
used for acne, no longer. The wets included cascara sagrada (laxative), spirits
of ammonia (smelling salt), peppermint water (mild carminative) and Stokes
expectorant (demulcent and suppressant). Those names still get me.

In the 1970s, the FDA
required proof of efficacy and safety for all items sold having a therapeutic
effect. There was no pharmaceutical company to bear the expense of an approval
process. Old standards such as Mercurochrome fell away along with dozens of others.
I also fell away but that drugstore air remains in a corner of my lungs,
pungent, floral and earthy in a special proportion I can conjure with any number
of old-world words…cimicifuga, asafetida, opodeldoc.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Taking in a Trump
news conference makes me nostalgic for George W Bush. Both men had to drop
breadcrumbs to find their way out of a sentence but Dubya seemed benign, even
humble. Of course he had much to be humble about.

Our current POTUS
forgets the question in the few seconds it takes for a reporter to finish
asking it. Regarding the spread of anti-Semitism he replied that he won 306
electoral votes, the largest margin ever. This was the answer to some imagined
question in his head and a falsehood, at that.

His attention span
and thought process are offensive to a rational mind. His non-sequiturs belong
on Saturday Night Live. And he butchers the English language like a fingernail
screeching on a blackboard which, I understand, is the same frequency as a baby’s
cry provoking our ancient brain to shudder. One might say, Grate.

Words don’t lie.
People do. In the wrong mouth language can lead us into sinkholes, incite a mob
or melt a glacier. The more we fear the more we loathe and that demands a fresh
supply of negative terms.

With his fifth
grade vocabulary Trump rants about everything wrong with the world in some sort
of post-literate mindlessness. His
hyperbolic superlatives have the effect of numbing the brain. His favorite word
is I but it seems as if it is, very, which precedes every adjective
unless he can add the est as in greatest, smartest, biggest (himself)….miserable, disgusting, nasty (everyone
else). His opponents are all losers,
total-losers, stupid, idiots or morons….and more recently, fake.

His constituency might
call it authenticity. The rest of us see it as near-incoherence, the ultimate
dumbing down of America. On the other hand maybe this is not retardation but
the ultimate salesman who has found a mono-syllabic way of communicating with
his base.

The English
language favors the nay-sayers. There are many more negative words than
positive ones. We are hard-wired to express trouble. Grab them. Throw him out of here. Lock her up. Trump has tapped
into the reptilian brain of aggrieved workers and the God-Gun folks who must imagine
some monstrous threat to their existence.

There seems to be a
correlation between corporate greed and low intellect. We may never know Trump’s I.Q. Clearly Republican
choices since 1980 are not for smarts but for electability.

Aside from his
grating the English language Trump’s first month has caused more grief,
needlessly, to millions of Americans. America has gone tribal not unlike the
Sunnis and Shiites. His cabinet and Supreme Court nominees have further grated
us. We are in for four years of more grating, more shredding of international
pacts on climate control, torture and assaults on our Constitution. Will his
presidency grate even his own party sufficiently to move the conscience of
Congress?

Sunday, February 12, 2017

It may be raining
and pouring but the old man isn’t snoring. I am snoozing soundly when pulsations
charge the air. No, it isn’t my bladder calling or a dislodged blanket. The
clock says 1:30 A. M. which translates to 4:30 Manhattan time.

Our
Twitter-In-Chief is at it again. Birds are not yet chirping but Donald is
tweeting his nocturnal emissions. He has the attention of the entire planet
which listens or not at their peril. Does he dream these blurts or set the
alarm to wake the world with his tantrums and 140-character manifestos?

Past presidents
deliberated over their manuscripts, draft after draft, weighing words with
scrupulous exactitude. Even then they didn’t always get it quite right.
Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg is regarded as the greatest political oration
in history. It is more than that. Those three paragraphs rise to the level of
poetic-prose in their concision, lyricism and complexity.

Yet one could
challenge its opening sentence. Four score and seven (87) years ago our fathers
Did Not bring forth a new nation. He
was referencing the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and we were not yet a
nation but a Confederacy of separate states. That happened twelve years later
with the ratification of the Constitution. The notion of State’s rights has
been used to extend Southern crimes against Blacks up to the present day.

Of course Lincoln
knew his history. He also knew about inequality. His words were aspirational.
In addition he spoke with humility, something which has almost disappeared from
public discourse since our 45th president took office.

We cannot hallow this ground. The brave men,
living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor
power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we
say here……

Lincoln was a
mensch. Tough, resolute and humble at once. He was both visionary and
pragmatist. Deliberate and decisive. Folksy shrewd and idealistic. He read. He
listened to his rivals. (He even did a great impersonation of Daniel Day Lewis.) In short he was everything Trump is not.

To have come this
far in science and technology, this close to an enlightened version of
capitalism…. and then to retreat a century is a punch in the gut. I need my
rest; a good six or seven hours with dreams of a better world inside my pillow.
A good night’s sleep is a many-splendored thing at my age. It’s the final
entitlement they better not take away. Let the nightingale trill and gurgle
overwhelming any tweets emanating from the tower. May the bird, in full-throated ease, sing its ode
answering those nocturnal emissions.

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

100,000 years ago,
give or take a week, there were at least six of us Homo (humans) roaming the
earth. Genus, that is. Homo Erectus, Homo Neander, Homo Denisovan, Homo Sapiens
(that’s us) and a few others in the area around Indonesia and elsewhere. This all comes from Yuval Harari's 2015 book, Sapiens, which has been translated into 26 languages. No
doubt we mingled, particularly with Neanderthal who may have been irresistible.
Grubby ahead of their time. They did have bigger brains than us and were
stronger. However we had one thing all the others lacked which has gotten us
this far. We could hit a curve ball.

Or to put it
another way, we, alone, could imagine. We could visualize what isn’t there and
not only get nine men on the field to play a game but get hundreds of millions
of us to believe in some construct such as religion or nationhood. In a famous
softball game that never happened Homo Sapiens beat Homo Neanders. Thus did
sticks and stones start evolving into Major League Baseball.

As an aside, one
might wonder if Donald Trump has more Neanderthal in him than the rest of us. I
would argue he has less since he can fantasize beyond the actual and call it
truth. But I digress.

I can almost hear
it. The thud of a ball going into a mitt, the crack of a bat, the infield
chatter, Chuck easy, Baby. In a few
days the Boys of Summer will be
reporting for spring training in mid-winter hoping to play in the fall classic.
They are men for all seasons. For me it is a way of setting my seasonal clock.

Rookies will
astonish, veterans will disappoint or as Shakespeare put it when he was a
sportswriter……

From hour to hour we ripe and ripe

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.

New surgeries have restored otherwise
wrecked careers. We’re getting close to bionic arms defying laws of physics throwing
the ball at 104 mph. Baseball is the traditionalist’s sport where the
scoreboard contains no clock and batters run counterclockwise back to pastoral
America. Yet the game has changed in ways only fandom knows, too esoteric to
elucidate.

The astonishment of baseball which has never
left me is the measurement, the feet and inches between bases and the distance
from pitcher to home plate. It seems to me divinely inspired. Another few
inches plus or minus would change everything. Furthermore the velocity of the pitched
ball appears miraculously to correspond to the bat speed of the current players.
Some Homo Sapien had a vision.

Our Tweeter-In-Chief has decreed that there are
to be only winners and losers. Baseball defies that commandment. The best
hitters fail 70% of the time. Teams on top generally lose 60-70 games each season.

My guess is that Sapiens lost to Neanders more than once but eventually
prevailed. Maybe it was our quilted loin-cloth uniforms that carried the day. Motley is the only wear.

Saturday, February 4, 2017

February is marked
by two dates which together form America’s two faces. Tomorrow is Super Bowl
Sunday, or for those of a different stripe, Stupor Bowl. It is our update of
Roman gladiators battling to the death or at least to a conclusion which makes
Las Vegas odds-makers salivate.

Count me among
those who allow the hormones to flow feeding my suppressed alpha male which,
for no apparent reason, snarls and growls for 3 hours. The players pretend to
brutalize each other and I pretend to care in the hope that all my aggression
for the year is sublimated.

It is also our time
to commune over pizza and beer. Over one hundred million of us will be
watching, Blue and Red, growing fangs on the couch together. This year Liberals
will be likely rooting for Atlanta against New England because the owner, coach
and star quarterback for the Patriots are avowed Trump supporters and therefore beneath contempt. Makes sense
to me.

Football is not
what it seems. Think of the huddle. The camaraderie. Now think of eleven
overs-sized or otherwise combatants each assigned to a specific role having
memorized a lengthy play-book adjusting in an instant to the other eleven men’s
counter strategy. It is practically chess on grass with an occasional
concussion.

Our other face
turns to love. Valentine’s Day is set aside to remind us how fortunate we are
to have found our chosen mate. To tell him/her, not necessarily with chocolates
and flowers, but with any expression of devotion. For the past 33 years Peggy
and I have made this day special with poems and candlelight dinner. It’s
getting to be a challenge finding a restaurant with a soft-backed booth and
white tablecloth. But the main course is our poems usually replete with private
language, un-translatable.

Feb. 14th
can also be the designated day to forgive ourselves for everything we didn’t
say, but felt, toward the other. All that affection that went unarticulated. We
might even shout a forgiveness for that guy who didn’t hold the elevator door
and while we’re at it offer a nod of pity for all those who have allowed the
barbed voice to poison their minds and impoverish their souls.

For us the day is
merely an extension of all the rest. I’m a lucky guy and I want to say it. It
is made sacred by the sanctity we give it, our shared reverence for being alive
in each other’s closeness. It doesn’t get any better than finding the one in
whose company we can discover our full self. Let this Valentine’s Day be our
filibuster against the madness of our country, our stay halting the moral
violence in the common air.

Thursday, February 2, 2017

It has come to
this. We’ve experienced thirteen days that shook the world. Tectonic plates
have shifted. The air is noxious. Saying President
Trump has me gagging. I require three Heimlich maneuvers to expel the
syllables. To regain a semblance of sanity I need to in-dwell, retreat from the
noise, and re-center myself.

Here I am at the
breakfast table. Today’s paper is being scrupulously un-read. It sits at the
base of a vase containing yellow tulips, now seven days old, in full erection,
bursting their incandescence like the bulbs they are. I had bought them still
folded and now the petals are open wide like a parched throat having found a
spring. It must be the sugar water I fixed for them or maybe they just enjoy our
conversation over Handel’s Water Music.

In my Trump-free
state I can see the still-life of our table. The yellows connecting from
flowers to banana to cereal box of Golden Grahams. I think the carefully
arranged clutter would challenge a Dutch master. The bowls, cups and glasses,
milk pitcher and melon, utensils, place mats, sugar bowl and napkins. I almost
forgot the yellow Splenda.

Could even
Rembrandt capture it all? And would he need to? He would find the pattern in
the jumble the way Rauschenberg would see it as collage or Pollack might give
it a splatter with a yellow streak. It was all invisible to me until just now.

Outside the window
leaves hang from some nameless tree. I must find out from either Roger, my dear
landscape architect friend of many years, or from the landlord who lords over
his plantings around the building rather lovingly. Confucius said to first know the names of trees. I’ve
gotten this far without that knowledge but I wish I could respect the tree with
its proper caption. I wrote poetry for a long while without the nomenclature.
My subject was my ignorance of such things. As a kid trees were called, 2nd
base or the goal line.

I should also know
the names of birds. Then I could report which one it was that just chased away
a crow four times its size. As Paul Harding reminds us in his wonderful 2009
book, Tinkers, the natural state of
Nature is strife. The hummingbird is constantly in flight from predators. Does
the cut worm forgive the plow? Adversity drives adaptation. The bough struggles
for a sliver of sun.

We need to make
peace with it all. Resistance is exhausting but so is it exhilarating and
sometimes, as now, necessary. Wait, I seem to be veering back to the
unmentionable. I shall not go there. This page is my therapeutic ramble away
from the fray.

Back to the table.
Yesterday I bought a melon. If it were a cantaloupe I’d be cutting it into perfect
quadrants. But it isn’t; it’s a honeydew. I’m getting adept at cutting it into
equal sextants or even octants. I didn’t know these words till I looked them up.
It’s the least I can do in compensation for not learning the glossary of life
outside our window. The large honeydew is my act of optimism. I expect it will
be ready for consumption in two weeks. I hope to still be here.